The poem, Milkweed and Monarch by Paul Muldoon is a rather short poem that has many different meanings. It begins talking about kneeling by his mother and father's grave. He goes about talking about how he does not feel grief for the death of his mother and father and how he would rather feel grief for someone else. In the last stanza he even says that he mistaken his mother's name for "Anger" instead of Regan, which is slightly confusing. One thought is that he is angry about the woman he is thinking about and those thoughts are still overthrowing the loss of his parents. Another interesting thing about this poem is that he continually say that "he could barely tell one from the other".
He seems to be comparing milkweed and monarch butterflys by saying that they could not be separated from eachother. In the beginning of the poem, he talks about a girl and the thought of the girl seems to outshine the memory of his lost parents. Thinking about the past from his parents and the present of a current love, cannot be mixed very well in his mind; therefore, he is not thinking straight and he cannot tell "one thing from another".
Work Cited
Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. "Milkweed and Monarch." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. 869. Print.
The most significant thing about the poem, and which unfortunately you don't mention, is that it is a Villanelle - and as such the poem turns on two refrains (the two repeating lines) which reinforce the duality and symbiotic relationship that the poem explores: the two parents - the butterfly (monarch) and milkweed (plant) which depend on each other for survival.
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